Gonzalo Giribet

Gonzalo Giribet is a Spanish-American invertebrate zoologist and Alexander Agassiz Professor of zoology and biogeography at the Museum of Comparative Zoology in Harvard University.^[2] He is a past president of the Willi Hennig Society and the International Society for Invertebrate Morphology, and past vice-president of the Sociedad Española de Malacología (Spanish Malacological Society).^[3]

Early life

Giribet was born in Vilanova i la Geltrú, Spain to a legal administrator and an engineer who were in charge of the nuclear power plants. As a boy, he enjoyed windsurfing, beachcombing, and collecting sea shells. He attended and then graduated from the University of Barcelona in 1993, with bachelor’s and doctorate degrees in zoology and fundamental biology.^[1]

Career

Early career

In 1996 he and his Spanish colleagues discovered that arthropods are monophyletic and that Tardigrade is their sister group.^[4] In the same year he, with the same group of authors, suggested that metazoan species are polymorphistic after he studied flatworm groups such as Dugesia, Seriata, Tricladida and Turbellaria.^[5] In 1999 he proposed to include Cycliophora as a sister group of Syndermata.^[6]

Later career

In 2001, with his colleagues from Australian Museum studied the systematics of some Arthropoda species.^[7]

In 2002, he and Ward Wheeler suggested that the molluscan bivalve group Anomalodesmata should be classless, and that the orders Myoida and Veneroida are not monophyletic.^[8]

The same year, he, Gregory Edgecombe, and their colleagues studied the phylogenetics of harvestmen, Opiliones, for 18s and 28s genes. Besides the genes, they also discovered that Dyspnoi and Laniatores formed the Dyspnolaniatores superfamily which should be used as new classification for Opiliones.^[9]

In 2006, he along with Jon Mallatt provided evidence that Branchiopoda not Malacostraca is the sister group of Hexapoda after studying ribosomal RNA in various phyla including Kinorhyncha and Ecdysozoa.^[10] The same year he also participated at Harvard Museum of Natural History exhibit where he, Naomi Pierce, Brian D. Farrell, and E. O. Wilson showed species of whip scorpions and Sonoran Desert millipedes.^[11]

In 2007 he traveled to New Zealand in an attempt to find daddy longlegs spiders but did not find any there.^[1] In August 2007 he traveled to Florida, where he proved that harvestmen spiders found there are relatives of the West African ones, because when the supercontinent Pangea broke up the North American part took some of those species with it.^[12]

In 2009, he discovered the origin and evolution of animal organ systems by studying such bilaterian groups as Acoela and Nemertodermatida, which also proved that Acoelomorpha is not a sister group to them. During the same study he also suggested that the genus Xenoturbella is not a part of Deuterostoma super phylum, and that the genus Symbion and the Deuterostoma actually belong to the Bryzoa and Entoprocta subphyla.^[13]

In 2009, he and his students traveled to West Africa particularly to Cameroon and Gabon, where they collected velvet worms to compare them to the species found in Central, South America, and the Caribbean.^[14]

Works

• Ricardo Pinto-da-Rocha, Glauco Machado, Gonzalo Giribet (2007). Harvestmen: The Biology of Opiliones. Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-02343-9. 
• Rob DeSalle; Gonzalo Giribet (2002). Techniques in Molecular Systematics and Evolution (1st ed.). Birkhäuser. ISBN 978-3764362577. 
• Rob DeSalle; Gonzalo Giribet (2002). Ward Wheeler, ed. Molecular Systematics and Evolution: Theory and Practice (1st ed.). Birkhäuser. ISBN 978-3034894425. 

References

External links

• Gonzalo Giribet: Harvard University faculty page
• Gonzalo Giribet's publications indexed by Google Scholar, a free service provided by Google